History is an echo

Twenty-seven years ago today, I was taking the day off student teaching at John F Kennedy High School to get my fingerprints and background check completed. It was nearing the end of my time with the kids before I finished up classes to become a fully certified teacher. We had moved to a new place in Littleton, CO, so after getting fingerprinted, I went to the DMV in Southwest Plaza Mall to update my driver’s license. Two things I remember about that early morning – I heard on the radio about something going on in a nearby high school with a large police presence, and I saw the helicopters circling Columbine. Southwest Plaza is on the other side of the park neighboring the high school, and I saw the cars of frantic parents trying to find their kids.

By the end of the day, we all had heard what happened – 13 students and one teacher had been gunned down and the killers had taken their own lives. It was the deadliest school shooting until Virginia Tech took the lives of 32 people in 2007. And none of us can forget Sandy Hook in 2012, in which 26 people – including 20 children from the ages of six and seven.

Columbine was not the first school shooting, and it certainly hasn’t been the last. Between 1999 and 2025, there have been an average of 6 active shooter events in K-12 schools per year, 55% in high schools. Every time something happens, there are cries of “never again,” and then the next one happens. Brady United shares that 390 school shootings have occurred since Columbine, with little action taken to prevent the next one.

In May 2022, after the Uvalde shooting, I wrote this post. I am still angry about the lack of gun control in this country. I’m still disgusted that there are those who value ownership of a gun they likely will never need to use1 over the lives of children. No, not all gun owners are murderers. But easy access to guns escalates violence in the US, especially when compared to other countries.

Today’s post is being written after a weekend in which a man, angry at his ex for leaving him, opened fire across multiple homes and killed 8 children, ages 3 to 11. This violence has a ripple effect across a community. Not only do we grieve for the children murdered in their homes by someone they know; we also grieve for the first responders who knew the victims and see the devastation of children’s lives cut short because an angry man had easy access to a gun.

I’m still so angry. And I am so sad. We know it’s going to happen again, yet we as a society have made our priorities clear – and they don’t appear to include the safety of children. Sandy Hook is often seen as the point of no return – if the death of 20 small children wasn’t enough to galvanize the country, what is? So I write this post on the anniversary of the Columbine Shooting – an event that seemed so implausible at the time, yet is almost common at this point. One more voice shouting into the void, trying to get someone to listen.

“But until we stop this violence, the cycle of violence, like I’ve said over and over again, we’re going to still be standing here, and it’s only going to get worse.”

– Shreveport Councilman Grayson Boucher

  1. The Harvard Injury Control Center has found that guns are used far more often to intimidate others than in self-defense.  ↩︎

Life is not a highlight reel

Like so many of us in the corporate world, I use LinkedIn (sometimes grudgingly) to connect with others. Look, it’s not my favorite site in the world, but in many ways it’s a necessity, so I try to focus on the benefits. ANYWAY… I was scrolling through my feed the other day and realized how little of it felt unfinished. Everything was presented as a completed thought. The lessons were clear. The vulnerability was controlled. Even the hard stuff showed up only after it had been resolved, when it was safe to talk about. Some of the posts felt like they were just missing the “tonight, on a very special episode of Terry’s LinkedIn feed….”

Each post was a single moment in time, presented as if it stood on its own.

And it made me think about how much we’re being trained to see the world in fragments.

LinkedIn isn’t unique in this, but it’s one that hits the business world hardest. It takes long, messy careers and compresses them into highlight reels. It turns ongoing work into finished insights. It rewards confidence, clarity, and closure, even when none of those things are honest representations of real life.

On the cutting room floor

I should probably admit that I can overthink this type of thing. I was a history major, and that way of looking at the world tends to stick with you. You get trained early to be suspicious of tidy explanations and single moments presented as truth.

In history, context isn’t optional. A quote only makes sense when you know who said it, when they said it, and what was happening around them. An artifact on its own might be interesting, but without knowing how it was used or what problem it was meant to solve, it’s easy to get it wrong.

That’s probably why LinkedIn, and social media in general, often makes me uneasy.

Most things that matter don’t make sense in isolation. Careers, decisions, leadership, relationships, etc., are shaped over time by pressure, tradeoffs, and accumulated experience. The way we consume information online trains us to do the opposite. We take in a post, a screenshot, a clip, a “stitch” (and yes, I know putting that in quotes makes me look old) – each one detached from what came before and what followed. Over time that starts to feel normal, even sufficient.

It isn’t.

When we start treating fragments as facts, it becomes remarkably easy to draw confident conclusions from very little information. We forget something archaeologists and historians take for granted: meaning lives in the context, not the artifact.

And once the fragment starts to feel like the truth, it changes how we judge people. We become less generous with our assumptions. Quicker to decide we understand someone based on a moment that was never meant to carry that much weight.

What we miss in the edit

When we lose context, we lose patience…and empathy usually goes with it.

It becomes easier to assume intent instead of complexity. Easier to believe that someone else’s decision was obvious, careless, or self-serving because all we’re seeing is the outcome, not the constraints, the history, or the tradeoffs that led there. We react to the end of the story without having seen any of the middle.

What makes this harder is that social media doesn’t just encourage that kind of thinking; it actively trains us for it. The constant stream of short, emotionally charged moments rewards quick reactions over reflection. Our brains get used to novelty, speed, and certainty. We’re nudged toward snap judgments because they feel efficient and satisfying, even when they’re wildly incomplete.

So we get quicker to judge and slower to wonder.

That shows up everywhere – not just in leadership, but in how we relate to colleagues, friends, and strangers. How willing we are to extend grace. How quickly we write people off based on a moment that was never meant to carry that much weight. A post becomes a personality. A decision becomes a character flaw.

At the same time, we start editing ourselves.

If every moment can be isolated and judged, we learn to present only the most defensible versions of ourselves. We share conclusions, not process. Results, not uncertainty. We wait until things are resolved before we talk about them, because unresolved things require context…and context doesn’t suit the algorithm.

Over time, this creates a strange feedback loop. Everything feels more staged, so we trust less of what we see. And because we trust less, we harden our judgments even further. The system rewards polish, but it quietly erodes understanding.

Finding the Director’s Cut

I don’t think the answer is to stop using these platforms or pretend they don’t shape us. They do.

But I do think we can be more intentional about how we show up within them, and how we interpret what we see.

That might mean slowing down before forming an opinion based on a single post. Reminding ourselves that most of someone’s story is off-screen. Choosing curiosity over certainty when we don’t actually have enough information to justify either.

And when we’re the ones posting, it might mean resisting the urge to over-polish. Offering a little more context than the format encourages. Letting things be unresolved. Accepting that real life, real work, and real people are rarely as tidy as a feed would suggest.

Context doesn’t fix everything. But without it, misunderstanding becomes the default.

If people who study ancient civilizations know better than to judge meaning from a single artifact, maybe the rest of us can learn to sit with a little more uncertainty when all we’re seeing is a moment, carefully curated into a post.

Seven Years In (and Still Surprised)

There’s something almost mythical about the number seven.

Hollywood certainly seems to think so. Seven Years in Tibet, Seven Year Itch, Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, Seven Pounds, Se7en (What’s in the box?!)…okay, that last one got a little dark.

Then there’s our cultural fascination with it. Lucky number seven, the 7 wonders of the ancient world, the seven seas, seventh heaven, the seven deadly sins…sheesh, that keeps coming up. Anyway, seven seems to recur as a number of significance.

I bring this up because last week, I marked seven years with IA.

That may not sound remarkable on its own, but for me, it’s quietly monumental. It’s the longest I’ve ever stayed at a single company and honestly, I can’t quite believe it. Some days it feels like I just started, like I’m still learning the rhythms, still discovering new edges to the work. Other days, it feels like I’ve been here forever – in the best possible way – grounded by history, but never stuck in it.

For most of my career, longevity wasn’t something I was aiming at. I always told people I build, I don’t maintain. I was motivated by learning, by momentum, by the pull toward harder, more interesting problems. When that sense of stretch faded in past roles, I moved on. Not because I’m Gen X and apparently destined to job hop, but out of a desire to keep growing and learning. Staying felt riskier than moving on.

So when I look back at seven years here, the real question isn’t why did I stay? It’s what kind of work makes staying make sense?

My work here at IA sits at the intersection of strategy, design, and transformation. In practice, that means we’re rarely solving the same problem twice. We partner with organizations navigating meaningful change – how they operate, how they decide, how they serve people, how they evolve over time. That kind of work doesn’t settle neatly. It resists templates and tidy endings.

What’s kept the work feeling alive for me is that I’m constantly encountering new systems and new challenges. Each engagement resets the context. I can’t rely on muscle memory when helping clients. I need to listen again, learn again, and adapt again. That exposure to “new” work across different industries, cultures, and moments of change has given me the sense of renewal I used to associate with changing jobs, without losing the grounding that comes from staying in one place.

Just as important as the work are the relationships we build with clients along the way. Transformation only works when there’s trust, and trust takes time. Being able to return to organizations, deepen partnerships, and see how ideas evolve from recommendation to execution adds a layer of meaning that’s hard to replicate. It turns the work from a series of engagements into an ongoing conversation, one where learning flows in both directions. I’ve made several connections that have lasted long after the client engagement ended.

Doing this work alongside the people I work with at IA makes all the difference. I’m lucky to be surrounded by colleagues who are thoughtful, curious, and willing to sit with complexity rather than rush past it. People who ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and care as much about how we work as what we deliver. This helps keep the work demanding, human, and deeply engaging.

Seven years in, I no longer think of staying as the opposite of growth. I see it as a different expression of it, one grounded in continuous learning, meaningful relationships, and work that keeps evolving in genuinely interesting ways.

I’m grateful to be part of work that keeps changing, with people who make that change meaningful. I didn’t expect to find a long-term home this late in my career. But here feels like exactly the right place to be.